Cloud Technologies, Inc. Is Taking Small Businesses to Great Heights

Birmingham, Ala., December 6, 2011 - Cloud Technologies, Inc. (www.cloudtechinc.com), a Birmingham, Ala.-based technology company, announced today two new partnerships with Birmingham-based Brownell Travel and Rush Wines.
Cloud Technologies was founded in 2009 by partners Jeff Freeman, Steve Jager, and Brad McLean, who during the economic downturn had an opportunity to obtain significant technology hardware equipment for an attractive cost. Sharing the foresight of major players such as Google, Amazon, and Apple, the partners anticipated that businesses would be interested in a way to reduce their technology capital and technology headaches through outsourcing. After the initial technology investment, partnerships with companies such as Dell, Cisco, VMware, Wyse, Polycom, and Brocade helped them to round out their offering.
An ideal customer for Cloud Technologies is a business with 50 to 100 technology users with a limited or non-existent IT department. “We had the goal of taking our large enterprise experience and expertise and leveraging that to create a set of solutions that could provide small businesses a technology platform that enabled them to be on an equal or advanced technology playing field with big businesses for an affordable cost,” said Jeff Freeman, vice president of technology at Cloud Technologies.
Cloud Technologies employs a thin client approach that ensures that small businesses are not investing in technology that will be out of date in three years or less. The company’s customers are consistently assured the latest technology, software updates, full backup, ability to access personal computer data from any location, and generally fewer technology problems.
“A company’s office could literally be destroyed and if their technology was in the ‘cloud’ they could operate business as usual the next day from a laptop,” said Brad McLean, president of Cloud Technologies.
One small business interested in exploring the types of solutions that Cloud Technologies has to offer was Birmingham-based Brownell Travel. Sheri L. McCook, vice president, Operations and Hosting for Brownell Travel says the company conducted an in-depth technology search, reaching out to multiple firms and asking them to evaluate Brownell’s current technology strategy and provide suggestions for a new strategy. Brownell was looking for a solution that would not only be “cutting edge” but would also be user-friendly for the entire Brownell team. “Cloud Technologies brought us the most innovative and globally reaching proposal,” McCook said. “Our team can ‘sit at their computer’ from anywhere in the world!”
For McCook and Brownell, the benefits of outsourcing to Cloud Technologies have been tremendous. In Cloud Technologies, McCook believes that Brownell has found a technology partner that shares their sense of urgency, attention to detail, and love for customer service. In addition, they now benefit from a much more robust, stable, and emergency-ready system than ever before.
“We can run reports exponentially faster with the new system,” McCook said. “We can watch videos from partners around the world without having to wait endlessly on buffering! And, the best benefit of our partnership is that our team can send more people on exceptional travel experiences because their productivity is greater with the faster processing,” she said.
Another new client that Cloud Technologies developed a technology solution for was the small business Rush Wines, a wine distributorship that operates out of a warehouse in Irondale, Ala., owned by Rush Garner. As a part of daily operations, Garner’s sales representatives located throughout Alabama were taking orders from customers and then phoning them into the warehouse where they were transcribed and entered into a computer.
“Our business was suffering from technological inefficiencies,” said Garner. “Order entry was time consuming, employees were not getting emails, and we were relying heavily on phone calls,” he said.
Cloud Technologies provided Rush Wines with a solution that relocated all of their server space to the “cloud” and deployed netbooks with 3G access to the sales team. “It was our goal to equip Rush Wines’ sales reps with a system that would enable them to quickly and easily submit orders while they are onsite with a customer, expediting the ordering process, and providing them with more time to sell,” said Freeman.
Rush believes that Cloud Technologies has extremely increased his company’s flexibility, while at the same time helping them to streamline costs. “Since we partnered with Cloud Technologies, we’ve had consistently reliable communication platforms, no complaints from our employees regarding technology, and we are much more efficient,” he said. “When you have fifteen employees spread out across the state, who are rarely ever in the same place at one time, the platforms that we use to communicate are critical, and Cloud Technologies really stepped up to the plate.”
“The beauty of what we offer is that customers only have to pay for the technology they need and they can leverage our expertise at the same time, said Steve Jager, chief financial officer of Cloud Technologies. Apparently an attractive combination, as in less than two years Cloud Technologies has acquired customers throughout the United States and has experienced an 800% growth in revenue.
About Cloud Technologies
Cloud Technologies, Inc. is a managed service provider and co-location service provider for small businesses throughout the United States. Services offered include hosted Voice over IP (VoIP) phone systems, server hosting, email hosting, high speed internet, virtualization, remote computing, network management, private and public cloud, and many others. For more information visit www.cloudtechinc.com, or contact Brad McLean at 205.484.2400 or brad.mclean@cloudtechinc.com.
About Brownell Travel
For more than 120 years, Brownell travel has provided discerning travelers with white-glove service and the most experienced and knowledgeable travel advisors in the industry. Beyond travel agents, our advisors are recognized as the very best by the leading travel magazines for their experience, expertise and highest professional standards. We have 3 offices in Birmingham, Atlanta and Mobile with about 60 employees and have a network of 65 independent contractors in 19 states. For more information visit www.brownelltravel.com.
About Rush Wines
Rush Wines is a small, Birmingham-based distributor of limited-production wines from independently owned wineries around the world. Founded in August of 2002 by entrepreneur Rush Garner, Rush Wines seeks to promote wine awareness in Alabama by bringing some of the world’s finest wines to its local markets, as well as by introducing consumers to the people
behind the wines. The company is also involved in the production of its own private-label series of wines, which embody our focus on higher-quality, handcrafted wines made by small-scale, family-owned wineries. For more information visit www.winesbyrush.com or contact Rush Garner at 205-956-9555.